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Tag: update-desktop-database

To give some context to this proclamation, I had written an earlier posting, about adapting the non-packaged software named ‘Ayam‘ to Debian / Stretch, that had worked just fine under Debian / Jessie. This is a GUI which constructs complex ‘Renderman‘-Compliant rendering instructions, in this case in the form of .RIB-Files, which in turn, ‘Aqsis’ can turn into 2D perspective views of 3D scenes, that have been software-rendered. OTOH, Ayam itself uses OpenGL and H/W rendering, for its GUI.

What I had found before, was that Ayam did not seem stable anymore under Debian / Stretch. I apologize for this assessment. Under close scrutiny, my computer has revealed, that it was really Aqsis giving the problems, not Ayam. Aqsis is a text-based tool in effect.

Ayam does not specifically need to be used with Aqsis to do its rendering. It can be set up to use other rendering-engines, most of which are quite expensive. Aqsis just happens to be the best Open-Source rendering-engine, whose language Ayam speaks. And at this point I’d say that Ayam is still quite stable, after all, under Debian / Stretch.

As is often the case with such troubles, I next sought to custom-compile Aqsis, to see whether doing so could get rid of its quirks. What were its quirks?

Finally, the only problem with Aqsis was and remains, that it cannot produce a real-time preview of the scene being edited, which it used to provide using a component-program named ‘piqsl’. And the reason why the packaged version of Aqsis does not have ‘piqsl’ under Debian / Stretch, is because this distribution of Linux has a very new ‘Boost’ library ( v1.62 ) , and the visual component to Aqsis, that could produce a display, still relies on the Qt4 libraries and their API, which have begun to bit-rot. The Qt4-specific code of Aqsis cannot parse the newest usage of the Boost libraries, and Debian maintainers have long since discovered this. They are shunning the use of ‘libqt4-dev’ and of ‘libqt4-opengl-dev’ to build any of their packages. So they were effectively forced to package a version of Aqsis, which was missing some important components.